"Raptor Lake" isn't an internal codename, it's very much external as it's what Intel actively referred to that generation as. How's a non-geek shopping for a PC going to know if it's better or worse than "Lunar Lake" or "Alder Lake"? Maybe they just think their machine is shipping with some game where your giant dinosaur bird thing has to stop off for a quick drink to regain energy.

But in any case, this isn't the real travesty with these names. It's that they're reusing existing common words. The article hates on "google" when actually it's a fantastic name - if you googled it when it was introduced, all the results were about what you wanted. By comparison, Alphabet is an awful name, because if you search for Alphabet only a tiny subset of the results are going to be useful to you.

Naming schemes in consumer marketing serve a function. They are easily identifiable, unique, and memorable. All of these properties serve to identify the thing by associating a unique name with a unique set of services/function/effects on use.

Medical and chemical terminology is built on the history of latinate terms and compounds whose simples follow the same pattern. Latinate terms, I might add, which reference mythical, fantastical, or unusual things. Consider the planet Mercury, for example. The only difference? The centuries of time it took for scientific evolution to turn these unique names into a taxonomical language with its own logic.

There is no such taxonomy for computer science. But in the course of the evolution of such a taxonomy, it will be built out of the mess of names like the ones we like to use for our programs and tools like Rust, Ocaml (notice combination of interesting and technical), git, npm, bun, ada, scipy, etc etc.

> Doctors prescribe "sildenafil," not "Viagra".

Depends on the location, I guess. I've had doctors prescribe trade names, which I don't understand if there are alternatives with the same dosage, route of administration and similar inactive ingredients. Not even talking about the "do not substitute" prescriptions which are also based on dubious information most of the time.

As for "sildenafil" - I don't think generic names are usually meaningful. Usually the suffix relates to the category of the drug, but the first letters seem as random as the letters in trade names. I could imagine a world where the generic name is viagrafil and the trade name is Silden.

Generic drug names don’t describe chemical structure, they allude to purpose but that’s all. ‘-afil’ is used to apply to a particular class of drugs, although when it was discovered, ‘sildenafil’ was the only example of that class, so it didn’t mean anything already.

This is like having the first tool of a particular type come along and call itself ‘Mosaic’ and then someone makes another tool of the same kind and calls it ‘Mozilla’.

But the names we're talking about are the ones used to market software to users? I don't see how the same logic doesn't apply